Five Suggestions For Twitter's Next CEO

Fail Whale At Night, Posters Delight

With speculation rising as to who the next person to fill the seat will be, I think we might be missing the point -- which is, making the site more usable to more people, so that it goes beyond its current dependency on its heaviest users. Let's get into the weeds, at more than 140 characters.

1) Put in daily post limits.

The single best point about Twitter is how expansive it can get when a topic gets in heavy rotation, with sudden flurries on topics far out-pacing the abilities of traditional journalism to compete. This is also Twitter's worst point.

A quick and simple way to fix this is to limit the number of Tweets that one account can issue in a day (I'd go for less than ten, myself, but I tend to be diligent about the editing). Do this, and your content providers will take more time crafting their words, and less time just reacting to what everyone else is reacting to.

2) Automate hashtags, but don't count that against the character count.

As much fun as it is to come up with your own hashtag words, this doesn't really make for a better platform, or easier search points for general users. What I'd like to see happen is for the service to start scanning works, then adding hashtags for the user to opt out of. I'm sure the v1 of this will be wonky, but in the long run, you'll save a declining asset from the tragedy of the commons.

3) Add micro-payment and bitcoin tip jars as a social option.

Favoriting Tweets and re-tweeting content to your followers is nice and all, but if Twitter is killing blogs (it is) in many categories, you really should try to do something to get back those penny-ante blog publisher CPMs. Twitter will likely take a cut of this action, which is only fair, and helps to tell a diversifying revenue strategy over time.

4) Get more local to get more competitive.

Why did Yelp grow in the age of Twitter? Because Twitter never conditioned its users to expect or even select content based on their local region. This should be relatively easy to engineer, and make the service more likely to pick up a bigger footprint in narrowcast advertising.

5) Video up.

As much as I'd like the world to stay with text, especially short and pithy amounts of it, it's not what the new to file users are very interested in. There's nothing that exists on Vine that shouldn't be on Twitter, and the fact that the former came on board with little in the way of response from Twitter is not a great moment for the old management. There is still time to get the horse back into the barn, but those doors swung wide.

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While I'm being neither brief and pithy, let's continue the conversation with you. Please like or share this column, connect with me onLinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Protecting Your Brand Against Success

Sorry, or really sorry?

There was a small but telling moment of celebrity brand management last week, and it reminded me of some of the things that I have ran into at past start-ups. It also ran into one of my personal interests – stand-up comedy – and an increasingly common aspect of modern life. That would be the public celebrity apology, delivered under duress.

Anyway… the back story is that comedian Amy Schumer, who made her reputation with edgy work that played with race, sex and class, apologized after an initial spate of defiance for the following one liner.

“I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.”

For the record, here is Schumer’s apology.

“I wrote this joke 2 years ago. I used to do a lot of short dumb jokes like this. I played a dumb white girl character on stage. I still do sometimes. Once I realized I had more eyes and ears on me and had an influence I stopped telling jokes like that on stage. I am evolving as an artist. I am taking responsibility and hope I haven’t hurt anyone. And I apologize if I did.”

I have a few issues with this.

First, the joke in question? It does not strike me as the least bit dumb, and here’s why – it works with just about any noun you’d like to swap in. Schumer could have used it for local crowd work to call out a college. She could have gone for a political edge, made it absurdist with a non-human species, called out an entire gender, or even directed it at herself. She is on a national tour later this summer, and could just put in the name of a different comedian every night. It really is that versatile, and especially on stage, quick hitters are always welcome. Had Schumer simply not been a growing star, not used a racial term, or someone with, well, a lot of eyes on her, I doubt anyone tries to pressure her to move off this kind of material.

Secondly, we are in something like a golden age of comedy right now. Between podcasts, streaming channels, a growing number of outlets and paid options, there are literally dozens of extremely strong pros working right now… and good work does not come from telling these folks what they cannot joke about. Or, even worse, that we need to consider the demographic of the speaker before judgment can be made. If a Hispanic comic had used a variant of the joke, is there a hue and cry? And if we have to determine who the speaker is before we decide whether or not it is OK to laugh, are we simply making the act of edgy comedy more or less impossible?

Finally, what does the degree of your celebrity have to do with the relative taste and appropriateness of your joke? Schumer has been a stand-up for over a decade, and has clearly served up far redder meat than this. Should her work come with a date and a context as to where she was in her career before anyone gives her a Tweet?

My suspicion is that Schumer was particularly sensitive to her past in the lead-up to promoting “Trainwreck”, and simply worked up as sincere an apology as possible in the middle of a press run, so that the movie would not get co-opted by PR. I also suspect that as a successful stand-up in the midst of a booming career, she might be looking to expand her repertoire to prove her chops in being able to work up new material. By apologizing, she gives herself the most precious gift a creative person can give themself -- a deadline.

But on some level, I’m hoping that success in this field brings liberty, rather than restrictions. The best example to set for future generations is to stay as funny as possible, as long as possible. If the reward for many years of club work and a great writing and acting performance in your first starring movie is a correctness straitjacket, that seems like a terrible payoff.

Oh, and as to how this relates to past start ups? I've worked at places that have shut down lucrative consumer categories once we got to a certain revenue level, because it was The Wrong Kind Of Business. Never sat well in my stomach, because it seemed to be so very far afield from Real Capitalism and Business, but PR is its own world. And so are start ups.

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In the way of a better payoff, I’d love to continue the conversation with you. Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

The Year Of The Internet Where You Live

Drive Carefully

A brief moment of storytelling. Indulge, if you will.

In January 2005, I was working at one of the world's most advanced online marketing companies. We served up behaviorally targeted work in a proprietary window, with fantastic targeting opportunities, cross-traffic analysis, and best-in-class reporting. I had the advantage of data driven insights in hundreds of properties and consumer categories, and it was incredibly fast-paced, with creative turns coming in a near real-time environment.

I was also in strong need of a vacation, especially at the end of the busy holiday season, and took one of the bigger ones of my life, a 2-week trip to New Zealand.

New Zealand in 2005 was, in terms of the Internet, about a decade behind the red-hot Silicon Valley scene that was my day to day. Wifi was in its infancy, cell phones (none all that smart) didn't work for much of the area, and connection speed was frequently open to question. I'd log in at cybercafes or in the evenings, clear my email, and took a couple of interviews with press and direct marketing companies while seeing the sights.

I also thought long and hard about emigrating. The country was (and presumably, is) incredibly beautiful, the food was great, and every time we went someplace new (we rented a car and went from the North Island to the South), it got even better. Professionally, I also knew that on some level, I had a tactical advantage of knowing what the future of the country would look like, and could use that to benefit clients. But in the talks that I had with many of the players there, it became clear that overcoming skepticism and conservatism would just be too frustrating, and starting over entirely new wasn't going to work on a personal level. If I had been 10 years younger, I probably would have decided otherwise, and my life would have been very different.

The broader point of bringing this up is the stark differences stayed with me as an opportunity not taken. Knowing when your industry, country or consumer category is, rather than just making the Naturalistic Fallacy of assuming that is what is true for you is true for all, is a strong consideration. And the relative when is only going to get more complicated with the advent of what's referred to as mobile today, and will be better understood later as the Internet of Things.

There are tactics (personalized recommendations, dynamic content, community and social media) that are done in, say, e-commerce... that have not come to pass in other categories or countries just yet. It's also possible that they might never; given the Web's downward pressure on profit margins for brick and mortar, you can see why some actors would prefer that this "progress" would not come their way.

But the same forces that made the lower fruit fall from the tree should, eventually, take care of most of the higher pieces. What happened to the music industry predicted, with cruel certainty, what happened to journalism. Connectivity across devices will speed things like showrooming, consumer reviews, social interaction into brand marketing, and so on, and so on. E-commerce efficiencies will start to intrude on last mile business where location has mattered more than connectivity. Targeting for lead generation and CRM was already used to great effect in the 2012 and 2014 political cycles, in ways that took many by surprise, but no one who works in high touch e-commerce.

So what does the savvy marketing and advertising pro do, to take advantage of this condition? Monitor not just your category, but others that match your demo -- especially if they are more technologically advanced or web-savvy. Consider how trends in the overall Web (social, mobile, changing browsers and platforms, wearable/IoT) might be used to impact your business, and lobby internally to have a proactive, rather than reactive, road map in development. Keep your eyes and ears open, because when the world changes, it doesn't do so with polite updates.

After all, we're thirty years and counting into an ever-widening role of connectivity changing our lives. If you can take advantage of being further along in the story, you've got a better chance of making that story work for you.

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Speaking of working for you, I'd be happy to. Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the quote boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.